NEA Counsels School Districts to Hide Gender Transitions from Parents

A teacher called home about a student in their class. The parent did not recognize the name and said that the student does not live in their home. The teacher must have the wrong number.

It turns out it wasn’t the wrong number. It was the wrong name. That student had changed their gender identity, name, and pronouns at school without their parents’ knowledge. The parents didn’t recognize their child’s name because the child had secretly transitioned from female to male at school. I learned about this incident during a staff meeting while teaching for the Salinas Union High School District in California.

Because of this incident, my district adopted a policy to not out students to their parents but hide their gender changes from their parents until they decide to let their parents in on their identity-changing secret. District officials coached us in an all-staff Zoom meeting, using this incident as an example, on the importance of not telling the parents of trans students their new names and pronouns unless the parent already knows. In other words, we were asked to lie to parents to hide that their child is secretly transitioning at school.

Nationwide Trans Craze

School districts nationwide are adopting policies that hide gender transitions from parents, and left-leaning school boards are having to contest with outraged parents over these secretive policies. School districts are facing several lawsuits filed by parents who had their children transitioned at school without their knowledge.

A mother in Maine is suing a school district whose counselors and teachers encouraged her daughter to transition without her mother’s knowledge. Another parent in California just won a lawsuit against the school district of Spreckles, a small town outside of Salinas where I worked, for secretly transitioning her 10-year-old daughter from female to male. She received a $100,000 settlement and has told the press that her daughter is now embracing her biological sex and no longer wants to be a male.

Where do most of these policies come from? Left-wing nonprofits pressure districts to implement these policies, and the National Educational Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in America, has decided to endorse the policy of hiding gender changes from parents.

A Grooming Guide

I recently came across a guide distributed to teachers and administrators nationwide. The guide “Schools in Transition: A Guide for Supporting Transgender Students in K-12 Schools” was produced in partnership with the ACLU, NEA, and LGBTQ groups. The guide confirms my experience of school districts secretly transitioning children without their parent’s knowledge or consent. In the section “Complex Issues, Unsupportive Parents or Caregivers,” it gives this chilling advice:

Whenever a transgender student initiates this process, the educator or administrator should ask whether the student’s family is accepting in order to avoid inadvertently putting the student at risk of greater harm by discussing with the student’s family.

Did you catch that? “Discussing with the student’s family” may “put the student at greater risk of harm” if the parents are kept in the dark. These tactics are the textbook definition of grooming—that is an adult having intimate conversations with a child about sexual and gender identity while keeping it secret from parents.

The guide goes on to suggest that school districts should have careful policies in place on “how to refer to the student when communicating with the student’s parents or caregivers, both in writing and verbally” and “how to refer to the student when communicating with the student’s siblings.” Put simply, just as my school district told us, use the child’s real name and pronouns with parents/siblings who don’t know about their transition and keep the change a secret from them.

There’s even a section on “working with parents who may be unsupportive, or disagree about how to respond to their child’s gender identity.” This is a major red flag. Of course, there’s no discussion here on the parents’ wishes being valid or something that should be respected and followed. No, the radical gender activists and the minor child know better than their parents.

Instead, when working with parents who disagree, the guide counsels school districts to use manipulation and threats of suicide. “As part of this effort, it is important to educate the student’s family members about the serious consequences of refusing to affirm their child’s gender identity.” The guide ominously claims school districts can “help families change their behavior” by telling them that rejection of their child being transgender “can have serious consequences for their children.”

In other words, the guide instructs school officials to tell parents their child will likely die if they don’t accept their child’s gender wishes, including but not limited to hormone injections, puberty blockers, and even mutilation of their young bodies with “affirming” surgeries like double mastectomies. That may be a simplified way of putting it, but that is exactly what it boils down to. Trans activists claim that refusing to affirm and celebrate a child heading down the road to permanent genital mutilation may drive the child to commit suicide. Of course, in this sick game of manipulation, they fail to mention how often “transgender” youth commit suicide after “transitioning.”

No Child Left Behind

Step back for a second and ask yourself, what does this all have to do with education or seeking better working conditions for teachers? Why is the nation’s largest teachers union engaged in such efforts to radically indoctrinate students and clandestinely subvert parents’ will and rights to raise their own children?

The inescapable conclusion is that government schools are no longer just schools; they have degenerated into indoctrination centers. The teachers unions are no longer just about helping teachers, if at all; they are simply another tool in a radical movement to transform America, one child at a time.